GATCOMBE, William

Nothing is known about this MP’s background, although it may be the case that he was related to John Gatcombe, a Wiltshire merchant recorded as a creditor at the staple at Salisbury in the early years of the fifteenth century.1 C241/195/72. Before he entered the Commons for the first time William had entered the service of the influential diplomat and former Speaker, Sir William Sturmy*, and in that first Parliament of 1423 he represented Ludgershall, where Sir William held a pre-eminent position as chief steward of Queen Joan’s dower estates and lessee from the queen of the lordship and borough. As a reward for his good service, in 1425 Sturmy granted him for life an annual rent of £2 from lands at Cowesfield, some eight miles south-east of Salisbury,2 CIPM, xxii. 716. and in the will he made on his deathbed on 20 Mar. 1427 he left this retainer a bequest of £2 13s. 4d.3 PCC 7 Luffenham (PROB11/3, f. 55). Later that year Sturmy’s feoffees, headed by Bishop Polton of Worcester, named Gatcombe as an attorney to deliver seisin to the deceased’s grandson and coheir, John Seymour I*, of certain parts of his inheritance.4 Wilts. Hist. Centre, Marquis of Ailesbury mss, 1300/43, 44.

A continued association with Seymour doubtless lay behind Gatcombe’s second election to Parliament, in 1432, when he sat for Marlborough. There, Seymour (like his maternal grandfather Sturmy before him) was a person of consequence, and it may not have been mere coincidence that he, as sheriff of Wiltshire, was the man responsible for sending the electoral returns to Chancery. Gatcombe’s third election, for Cricklade in 1435, saw him accompanying Seymour, one of the shire knights, to the Commons.